By all accounts, the athletes of Arkansas men’s and women’s tennis programs were doing everything right. They were engaging with the community, running camps, posting high GPAs, and playing competitive tennis.
So head men’s tennis coach Jay Udwadia was shocked when the Arkansas athletic director informed both him and women’s coach Tucker Clary that both programs would be discontinued at the end of the 2025–26 season.
“My initial reaction was, ‘That’s funny. April fools, right?’” Udwadia said in a phone interview with Front Office Sports on Monday. “[AD Hunter Yurachek] was like, “No, I’m sorry, that’s what it is.’ And so Tucker and I were really shocked.”
The Razorbacks programs are two of more than 20 NCAA teams that have been cut this season—almost a dozen of which are Division I programs. Just last week, three other Division I schools announced moves: North Dakota and Saint Louis would discontinue both men’s and women’s tennis, while Illinois State would discontinue men’s tennis. But the Razorbacks are an outlier in the sense that they’re not part of a cash-strapped, low-level D-I athletic department—they’re members of the SEC, the second-richest conference in college sports.
Udwadia, who played Razorbacks tennis in the 1990s, described Arkansas as having a “rich tradition” spanning decades. When he was a student in Fayetteville, he helped lead the team to three NCAA tournament appearances and a top-25 ranking. He played under longtime coach Robert Cox, considered a pillar of the sports community in the city.
Udwadia and Clary were trying to continue that tradition, he said. The coaches were planning to host a tennis tournament next season on campus. That was what they assumed they would chat about with Yurachek and other administrators during the meeting scheduled for the morning of Friday, April 24.
Instead, Yurachek delivered the blow. The reasoning, according to Udwadia, was budgetary—the school needed to take the $2.5 million worth of operating costs for both tennis programs to reallocate across the athletic department in the era of the House v. NCAA settlement.
Yurachek gave the coaches a few hours to gather their teams before a public announcement went out.
He told Udwadia the health of the programs had nothing to do with the decision. “There was nothing that Tucker and I did wrong—he reiterated that to us,” Udwadia said. Udwadia rattled off several impressive stats: The men’s team had the highest GPA of anyone across divisions; he had coached three All-Americans in four years; the men’s program was on track to be a top-25 team next season. He also noted the women’s team had just missed out on an NCAA tournament bid.
At 12:30 p.m., just a half-hour before the school’s press release, the men’s and women’s programs gathered on the club level of the athletic department facilities. Yurachek spoke for a few minutes, announcing the news and telling players that they would be able to keep their scholarships.
“It was pretty sad,” Udwadia said. “A lot of players were crying—just disbelief, you know?”
Shortly after, the athletic department released a lengthy statement, complete with an FAQ section for athletes, explaining the decision and what steps players should take next. (Arkansas declined to comment for this story.)
For the men’s program, the news came at a particularly peculiar time: three days before the NCAA tournament selection show. The Razorbacks earned a spot, with a first-round match against Cornell at TCU on Friday, May 1. They had to turn their attention from the impending death of their program to the competition ahead—which would also be their last.
“The next day we had practice and you could just see the team was kind of frustrated,” Udwadia said. “I just told them, listen, you guys play for Arkansas. And you guys play for that hog on your shirt no matter what happens.” He described the rest of the practice as “great, amazing.”
On Friday, before the team squared off against Cornell, Yurachek posted words of encouragement on X for the men’s tennis program. But given the recent news, the post drew heavy criticism, with multiple comments and quote-tweets of the post called Yurachek “tone deaf.”
The Hogs lost a close match to Cornell, 4–3. “The match at TCU was unbelievable,” Udwadia said of the season-ending loss, which he described as one where players left everything on the court.
As for what’s next: The tennis transfer portal opened this week, which players can utilize if they want to keep playing in college. But at the same time, Udwadia said that the alumni base at Arkansas has rallied around the program and is working on a plan to find a way to get the program reinstated. There’s a Change.org petition with more than 4,700 signatures; Cox, the former longtime coach, is speaking out in the local press, arguing that the teams can be saved.
But while there’s movement behind the scenes, the coaches themselves are letting the alumni base handle most of the advocacy work. “Tucker and I are kind of staying out of it, and trying to focus on our teams right now and finish off the school year.”
